Black Eyed Susan

by Elizabeth Leiknes

  Last week I tried changing my name from Rainbow Warrior to Amitola, which means rainbow in Chippewa, but the tribe is having none of it. What they really can’t let go of is the “warrior” part—they like their shamans to have strong names. But what exactly do they want me to fight for? I am conflicted between living in this world, and also honoring the old world, the one I hear so much about. Part of me believes I have the past living inside me. Maybe that’s why my memory is strong. Not all of my memories are ones I want to remember.

  But I want to remember everything that happened yesterday, because yesterday, I healed someone. I know I’m not supposed to brag, but it felt really good. It sounds corny when I say it that way, but Lilly Running Wolf doesn’t think it’s corny. She’d been in the sick tent for two weeks, and she was starting to see the colors and the future—that’s really bad. Auntie said she would soon be flying with the eagles, a nice way of saying she was not long for this world.

  Anyway, I blew tobacco smoke over her whole body to help me find the sickness. I can’t explain how I found it—just a feeling. And then I sucked it out. Kind of gross, I know. SO glad it wasn’t Sitting Bear. He’s SO cute! I would’ve been SO embarrassed. Not that he even talks to me. Whatever. So when I spit out the sickness, it had this weird taste. Different sicknesses have different tastes, but this one was strong. It tasted like … regret.

  So, Lilly’s doing great and everybody on the reservation is treating me like some sort of sacred witch doctor. They’ve given me a special robe to wear. It’s a little big, but they say I’ll grow into it. And they’ve started this list of really sick people for me to help. I call it my challenge list. Like a bunch of really hard math problems. Cool, huh?

  I miss you and I don’t even know you. Is that weird or what?

  Love,

  Rainbow Warrior

  I put away the letter with a sense of renewed hope. My twin sister was a bigger freak than me. What were the odds of that? If I could just get to her soon, she could suck this sickness out of me, I could pay her in whatever you pay a New York shaman, and then we could catch up and do fun sister things, like go to the mall and talk shit about our old boyfriends. And I could introduce her to Calliope and Will. Maybe my sister had a husband by now, and he and Will could go golfing or something, and we could call Leo and Mabel and let them know the good news, and then we could make a trip to see our mother together, and actually begin living my life, really living, and …

  I jumped up from my chair, excited to get some sleep and dream about my potentially great new life. On the way out of the pool area, I noticed two people in the community Jacuzzi, which was odd for that time of night. I thought I heard one of them say my name, but I kept walking. When I heard the familiar accent, I developed an immediate and severe headache.

  When I looked closer, I saw Mono and Clyde, shirtless and hairy as ever, soaking in the hot tub. They both hid behind open books. Clyde’s lanky body barely fit in the water, and he looked like he was sitting in the shallow end of a baby pool. He peeked out from behind an Italian translation of Lonesome Dove, just long enough for me to see his eyes. Mono was so short he almost disappeared into the water, his book skimming the surface. And he was really into it—he wasn’t just pretending. Orwell’s 1984 was apparently so riveting, Mono didn’t even notice me.

  But Clyde poked Mono’s hairy arm, letting him know I was near.

  “Hello, boys,” I said. “Look, before you get all private-detective on me, I should tell you that I’m in the middle of a real pisser of a crisis and—”

  But before I could finish, Clyde motioned with his eyes for Mono to get out of the water. For a stocky fellow, Mono moved with surprising speed. He grabbed something out of his briefcase, and then ran past me. Within seconds, I heard a thump, and Clyde’s eyes widened to unnatural proportions. He flew out of the hot tub and raced past me, over to Mono, who was lying limp on the concrete.

  “Oh my God. Is he okay?” I asked. “Did he trip and hit his head?”

  Clyde yelled “EEEEEDIOT!” and slapped him.

  “Is this a cultural thing?” I asked. “Because in this country, it’s sort of frowned upon to beat a friend when he’s already down.” And then I saw it—a syringe sticking out of Mono’s hairy leg. “What the hell is that?”

  A nervous Clyde said, “Eees nothing. Mono has the diabetes. Eees insulin.”

  Something was amiss. I walked over to Mono’s open briefcase, no doubt a duplicate of one he’d seen on Remington Steele, and hanging out of it was a business card.

  And then I saw an empty box with the word “Thiopental” on it. “Jesus, Clyde, that’s serious stuff. Why would Mono—”

  Mono was coming to life. He laughed and began talking in a slurred baby talk. “Eees not for me, Mees Spector. Eees for you!”

  Clyde kicked him and said, “He not know nothing. He hit hees head.”

  Mono continued his drug-induced monologue. “Mees Spector, our boss, dee Mees Abigail, she need to know dee truth, so …”

  It was suddenly clear, and I nodded my head. “You were attempting to give me truth serum, but you tripped and accidentally injected yourself.”

  Clyde looked embarrassed. “I am, how you say, ass-hamed, Mees Spector. We should no have taken the order from the Mees Abigail.” For a moment, he looked angry. “I am not loving dees job as of late.” He looked up at me. “You are nice person, Mees Spector. You are, how you say, already the honest.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not, Clyde.”

  Just then, Mono began to blubber like a child who’d been caught doing something bad. The drug, now coursing through Mono’s little Italian veins, was working at full force. His chemically-induced honesty, painful to hear, emerged as an entire lifetime of sins and secrets, organized from bad to worse.

  Still bawling and snorting, Mono said, “When I was dee little boy, I takes it and puts dee gomma in me pocket.” He was speaking in broken English, with a random Italian word thrown in here and there.

  “What’s gomma?” I asked Clyde.

  Clyde shook his head. “Eees gum. Sounds like he took dee packs of gum when he was dee wee boy.”

  Mono wasn’t finished. His lower lip formed a pout, and he continued, “And when I was dee bigger boy, I told mee mama to shuts up, and she cry like a baby.” And then Mono cried like a baby.

  “Get holds of you self!” Clyde said to him, but Mono was on a roll.

  Mono hid his face in his hands. This one was going to be good, I thought.

  “Era lui!” Mono shrieked in one final, embarrassing admission.

  I looked to Clyde for a translation. The corners of Clyde’s mouth began to curl up, his anger replaced with an almost-smirk. “He say dee girl was really dee boy.”

  Nothing would have given me more pleasure than to hear about Mono’s misguided sexual adventures, but I had an appointment with a shaman. “Clyde, I’m sure you want to get a good review from your boss, but between you and me,” I said, pulling him in close to me, “she’s a frickin’ psycho, and you’d be better off without her.”

  He looked sad. “But what about the Mono?”

  As I looked at Mono, still lying in a heap, confessing strange and disturbing acts, I wondered what it was about Mono, the hazardous sidekick, that made Clyde stick with him.

  Clyde leaned over Mono and spoke softly. “It be okay, Mono,” he mumbled. “Never leave dee wingman”—a la Top Gun.

  Duh! They were friends. Friends do things like help each other when in need, laugh at each other’s foibles, and tell each other the truth.

  Affected by the moment’s sentimentality, I softened and tried to find a solution. “I’ve got it, Clyde! Why don’t you just tell Ms. Abigail that you gave me the serum and make the rest up. Say whatever you want. Knock yourself out.”

  “But that would be the lying,” he said.

  Damn, my head hurt.

  “Fine,” I said, gesturing in a frenzy of frustration. “What do ya want to know? Bad things I’ve done?
Easy. I, uh, purposely misspelled the word ‘discotheque’ in my sixth-grade spelling bee so James Andrews wouldn’t think I was a geek, and three years ago I wrote off two-thousand dollars’-worth of CDs on my taxes for job-related ‘research,’ and …”

  Not getting the answer he wanted, Clyde walked toward me, his flip-flops squeaking with each step.

  He grabbed my arm. “Mees Spector?” he said with an intense stare. “Mees Abigail say the path to enlightenment is cemented in dee truths, but dee regrets are, how you say, roadblocks.” His speech was slow and purposeful. “Regret is like dee tumor of dee cancer. It eats away at you until no ting ees left.”

  I shoved an invisible knife into my cancerous chest and spoke into the night air. “Stab me a little deeper. You missed my heart by a sliver. And stop mixing metaphors. The road metaphor is much stronger than the tumor one. The whole cancer thing’s a little clichéish.”

  When I winked at Clyde, he looked worried and confused. “Mees Spector? Eees it something I said?” And then he noticed my atlas. “What path you take, Mees Spector?”

  I looked at where I was and where I needed to be—east—closer to White Plains. A town in central Virginia caught my eye. “Appomattox,” I said, pointing to a small black dot on the map. It was time to admit defeat and submit. Calliope deserved to know the truth. And Will deserved to know me—the real me, the dying me.

  As Clyde helped Mono to his feet, he said goodbye for the both of them, but something told me I would see them again. “Good luck,” Clyde said in a serious tone, like one soldier says to another on the eve of a great battle.

  I collected my atlas and my sister’s letters, then waved goodbye. The two Italians took a temporary break from hunting me and sent me on my way, urging me to embrace the hard truth on the road to enlightenment.

  No regrets. I would come clean. I would stop living a lie.

  I would surrender at Appomattox.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The day before, I’d seen the mother of all oxymorons. It screamed at me from a giant billboard as we were leaving Normal. Underneath a picture of a geriatric married couple holding hands was the headline “Death Benefit.”

  Only a life insurance company could make death seem so inviting. A death benefit is the payoff a beneficiary gets from a life insurance policy. A policy’s premiums are determined by an actuary—someone who decides how likely it is you will die based on your lifestyle.

  But I was an actuary’s hugest nightmare. My predicament was illogical. I was a young, healthy, nonsmoking woman with a safe occupation (if you didn’t count dangerously depressing encounters with Tom Waits). If you believed in the numbers, I should’ve enjoyed a long life. But the not-so-little malignant tumor in my lung had made me a statistical anomaly, a glitch in the numbers. That’s what I was—a glitch. That’s what I always had been. My existence defied all odds.

  I was thinking of this as I used my ambidextrous hands, which only one percent of all the people in the world have, to lift the covers off me. Me—the ambidextrous, colorblind, leap-year baby dying of a rare disease, on her way to visit her twin-sister shaman who didn’t know she existed. When I thought about all of my extraordinary traits, I was reminded of once being called an Indigo child, a term used to describe those freaky kids with weird eyes and strange psychic and multi-dimensional healing abilities. As soon as the word “indigo” registered in my brain, I heard ABBA sing “Take A Chance On Me” and I hoped I was worthy of the lyric.

  As I swung my legs from the bed to the floor, I heard Calliope in the adjoining room listening to the morning news. When I walked in to say good morning, I glanced at the television to see a newscaster wearing a bad matchy-matchy suit from Casual Corner. Her voice, thanks to several cups of early morning coffee, oozed with fake optimism, and when she delivered the latest dark statistics, she sounded like the grim reaper on antidepressants.

  The hair-sprayed and lipsticked blonde said with a forced smile, “A new study tells us that contrary to popular fears, you are five times more likely to get killed in a car than in a plane. Furthermore, you are also more likely to die of lethal injection than get struck by lightning.” She cleared her fake throat and raised her fake eyebrows. “Great news for golfers! Back to you, Jim.”

  Calliope looked into the mirror, turned her pigtails into a smarter ponytail, and saw me staring at the television screen. “Which is a better way to go, ya think?” Calliope asked. “Lethal injection or lightning strike?”

  Hmmm. They both sounded delicious. “It depends on if you want to go out with a bang, I guess.”

  After we left the hotel, I made the radio game point us straight toward Appomattox, Virginia.

  But when the radio turned to static, Calliope got excited with a conversation starter. She clapped like a monkey with miniature cymbals. “Okay—most romantic movie moments. I’ll go first.” She sat in the passenger’s seat, stared out the windshield at the cracked highway winding into the distance, and, without apology, declared an unconventional film romance as her favorite: “Forrest Gump and Jenny.” We didn’t dare laugh. After all, it was her representation of real love. “Their love isn’t sexy. It isn’t even romantic, by normal standards,” Calliope said in-between passionate gum chomping, “but it’s real—enduring and unconventional. It’s not that they don’t see each other’s flaws. They just don’t care. They see beyond them.”

  “Your turn,” she said, pointing to me.

  Shit.

  I had an answer, but it was too true, too close to my heart to risk sharing—I’d be laughed out of the car. For me, Clark Kent and Lois Lane were the real deal. Superman, in the ultimate gesture of true love, disobeys the rules and stops time to save Lois. Ever since I saw that movie as a little girl, the so-called knight in shining armor was, in my mind, always wearing a cape and ready to revive me from boredom, even death.

  But I decided to go with a safer answer—nothing too hokey and something hip, so Will didn’t think I was a sentimental fool. I attempted to look honest. “Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in True Romance,” I said, knowing that nobody could possibly make fun of a viciously cool movie where the romantic couple’s climactic love scene features a heavily armored Mexican stand-off. Besides, Will would never answer this question seriously.

  But when I looked at him, his face collapsed a little. “Really?” He turned his head toward me, and I could tell he didn’t believe me.

  “Your turn,” Calliope said to Will.

  He didn’t hesitate. With his hands placed firmly on the steering wheel, he said, “Romance is an overrated concept—just a fake, idealized notion of love. Real love is about sacrifice.” I waited for a dirty joke or at least an F-bomb, but instead a serious Will said, “As a kid, my idea of love was defined when Superman, against all superhero rules, turned back time to save Lois, the love of his life.”

  I sat frozen in the back seat, realizing that Will did not lie—it didn’t occur to him. “I remember sitting in front of our Magnavox with a Salisbury steak TV dinner, staring at Superman circling the Earth and carrying the weight of the world for this woman. And I remember thinking my dad would’ve done that for my mom if she were in trouble. He would’ve become a superhero for her, if he had to.” Will rolled down the window a bit, and in a slow and deliberate series of breaths, inhaled the Indiana air. “My dad and Superman—they were men. Super men. And I wanted to be just like them.”

  After a full day’s drive, and plenty of creative radio-game manipulations by yours truly, we’d finally arrived at my secret destination. Calliope took the Appamattox exit, then pulled into a truck stop complex with a restaurant on one side and a super convenience store on the other. So there I was, an ailing General Lee, preparing to give up. As my stomach began cramping up with the prospect of revealing the truth to my friends, the sky followed suit by darkening, its clouds swirling and contracting, like it would soon puke up violent bursts of rain.

  While Calliope pumped gas and Will cleaned the windshield, I w
alked into the convenience store to buy some liquid courage. I grabbed a six-pack of beer and downed one while waiting in line. Standing ahead of me was a woman in worn, mismatched clothes, with her barefoot young daughter. No daddy was in sight. The mother smiled at her daughter and held her hand tight, but when the little girl looked away, the mother’s smile faded into an anxious grimace.

  “Is this it, ma’am?” the clerk asked the woman as he began scanning the two items she’d placed on the counter.

  “And a Power Scratch ticket, please,” the woman added with her head down, her voice a resounding anthem of desperation.

  For a moment, I forgot about my own dismal thoughts, and wished a different life, a better life, for the young mother. On the counter, she’d placed a half-gallon of milk and a small kids’ book with the words “First Reader.” The book’s cover featured a giant spinning Earth, complete with an open door sticking out of North America and a small girl holding a ticket. In kid-friendly font, the title was Reading: Your Ticket to the World.

  As the clerk handed the lottery scratch card to her, I wondered if today would be her lucky day, the day she could finally give her daughter the world. But the odds were against her, and by the defeated tiredness in her eyes, they always had been.

  “Six fifty-eight, ma’am,” the clerk told her.

  The woman rummaged through her wallet, pulled out a five-dollar bill, and in a panic, turned her purse upside-down on the counter to collect any loose change. Embarrassed, she said to both of us, “Sorry to keep you waiting, I must have forgotten my other cash at home.”

  After some more frantic fumbling, an annoyed clerk said, “Look, lady, we got people in line. You’re gonna have to put something back.”

  The woman looked at her three potential purchases: the milk (nourishment for the body), the book (nourishment for the brain), and the ticket (hope for the soul). She stared at the ticket, her passport to another life, and then made a motion to hand it back to the clerk. Just as the clerk was about to grab it, the little girl shook her head “no,” put the ticket back on the counter, and turned around to take the book back to the rack where she’d found it. But the woman grabbed the girl’s arm, shook her own head, and handed the ticket back.